Content Volume and Records Management: More and Less
The volume of information entering, traveling within and leaving organizations has many IT, RM, legal counsel and compliance professionals seeking and debating best practices. Keep everything forever or purge everything as soon as possible? Both bring equal risks and can vex knowledge workers struggling to glean relevance and value out of the content chaos. Across industry sectors, consensus is building on consolidation, simplification and defining and adhering to processes surrounding records and information management.
Consolidation: Repositories, Technology and Metadata
Legacy networks and content silos designed and implemented a decade ago were built to service local users, resulting in local servers, local applications, local content stores and significant requirements for local administration. Advancements in performance and functionality that cost less are happily met by cost-conscious IT departments, as centralization of systems and content stores has improved performance for users while alleviating administrative burdens. Complementing system consolidation in today's enterprise is technology convergence. Separate platforms and processes for document management, image processing, records management and workflow have coalesced into enterprise content management (ECM), with vendor consolidation echoing the business demand for seamless integration with and merging of the core building blocks of knowledge commerce.
What's ensued is an explosion of content metadata tracked across these coalesced systems and processes. Frequently, metadata hasn't been rationalized to bring value to varying constituencies working in today's enterprise. IT seeks to avoid cost and performance issues in storing unnecessary data, while RM seeks data to classify information for business, legal and retention purposes. And business users simply want to find the information they need quickly, independent of lifecycle concerns.
Despite consolidated repositories, variances in departmental metadata can make cross-enterprise searching difficult, if not impossible. And monolithic records taxonomies originally built to find and manage physical records are not effective at managing electronic records. The consolidation of disparate systems and the evolution from physical to electronic records management is driving simplification in records categorization.
Simplification: Big Bucket vs. Little Bucket
The amount of metadata tags needed to find a piece of paper in a file in a drawer in a cabinet on a floor in the records center could result in a records file plan with thousands of elements. Granted, custodians of physical records were and are constrained by storage limitations that drive detailed container management and tracking. But does this translate to electronic records, where custodial functions have given way to risk management concerns? Many managers of electronic records are finding that retention taxonomies of any size aren't used as a search tool to find information; they're used to appropriately identify information lifecycle properties—the rules defining content value and business, legal, or knowledge management reasons for retention. Finding enterprise information is facilitated instead by tools for indexing, searching and presenting metadata and content, delivering on-demand access to users on an abundance of content channels (via the Web, from Windows desktops and e-mail applications and from mobile devices). As a result, records taxonomies are being flattened. Records managers are strategizing how to bring a thousand "buckets" down to a hundred (or fewer), separating what is valued from the operational, mission-critical perspective from the administrative one. Records and information management professionals are recognizing that little buckets are no longer effective, and even alienate an already overburdened user community in the capture, identification and use of content.
Records Categorization: Less User Involvement, More Automation?
So the good news is that users are seeing relevant record metadata based on their business function. The bad news is that users may not see the point. With the volume of data they receive, search through and process every day, are users going to be expected to be trained and held accountable to recognize a "record-worthy" item and associate its appropriate record bucket? And if so, will the technology make it fast and easy for users to interact with the records process?
The debate of user-based versus automated records categorization continues in IT and RM circles, but leaders in both fields agree that information velocity and innovation tip the argument in favor of automation. So much is known about records from metadata and content alone—and even more metadata is made available from the business process flow of content—that at least some measure of automation is in widespread use today. This may be driven by user interaction at the core, but not as a discrete question posed to the user about retention. Rather, retention is determined by the values associated with the content—the business function, the type of document and the context—elements already exploited by simple usage, capture and process.
Improvements in user-independent methods for records capture and categorization continue to be deployed, from rules engines to knowledge management indexing and more. Increases in content volume are being met by the maturity of categorization technology, and trust in these methods is growing in the information management community. The simplification of retention taxonomies combined with the increasing automation of record capture results in more consistent application of record policies, optimizing organizational performance while minimizing risk. Successes have been realized and aren't just strategy for the future: examples of organizations that have used Hummingbird solutions to simplify their records taxonomies while minimizing user involvement in records identification include the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Department of Treasury.1
Compliance: Process Adherence and ROI
Content volume and global compliance mandates illustrate the critical need for effective management of information capital, and increasing concerns for accountability and transparency are driving information management practices. Provisions related to the Freedom of Information Act, privacy acts, financial accounting practices, anti-money laundering legislation and others expand the context of what types of information need to be tracked, and at what point in time. Organizations need to meet governance requirements for making business content traceable, secure and auditable at the same time as they invest in aligning business processes and content to optimize performance and reduce risk exposure.
| Business Process | ECM | + ILM | = CLM |
| What content is captured? | • | • | • |
| What metadata is associated? | • | | • |
| What business rules apply? | • | • | • |
| When is content captured? | • | | • |
| When does content expire? | • | • | • |
| When is content a record? | • | | • |
| When does content change locations? | | • | • |
| Where is content stored? | | • | • |
| Why is content captured? | • | | • |
| Why does content expire | • | | • |
| Why is content a record? | • | | • |
| How is content stored? | | • | • |
Content and records stakeholders champion the services available in enterprise content management (ECM) solutions to meet requirements to capture, manage and access knowledge assets throughout their lifecycle, with business-driven rules for records retention. At the same time, IT stakeholders laud the benefits of information lifecycle management (ILM) solutions to cope with content volume, relying on facilities for migrating data across storage platforms with care for preservation and availability. So ECM or ILM? RM or IT? The answer is both. Enterprise content begins and ends with defined business processes. These business processes determine what content is managed, and why, when is it captured and for how long it is retained (mainly, aspects of ECM), combined with processes that determine where content is stored, for how long and when it may move to alternate storage locations (aspects of ILM).
Business processes also determine how knowledge users interact with and benefit from content solutions, including better searching, knowledge mining and content organization that improve efficiencies and customer service. These elements aren't in conflict—the organization must meet them in tandem to meet today's content compliance demands. ECM and ILM have discrete benefits while missing key elements needed for a complete content lifecycle solution. ILM can regiment where content is stored, where it migrates over time and how it is stored (compression, encryption, security). And ILM is engineered to relieve the storage burden that e-business volume creates. But ILM is weak in business process integration, in the enforcement of legal holds during inquiries, in the administration of records disposition and in enterprise access across information and content stores. The good news? ILM's weaknesses are ECM's strengths, and the two combine in the form of content lifecycle management (CLM) to reduce risks, lower storage costs and improve organizational agility with regular, reliable lifecycle management and disposition processing of content assets. CLM enables processes for checks and balances to prevent tampering by internal or external parties as well as reductions in the costs of both ad hoc compliance and physical storage assets...all while improving access to information.
One Centralized System, Accessible, with Records for All?
The remaining debate on volume in information management circles concerns the concept of true "enterprise" records management. IT and RM solutions tend to focus on unstructured content, but structured data, legacy system data on mainframe systems and Web content (both static and transactional) all have governance applications. No one system can house these disparate types of records, but administrators can realize consistent use of records metadata, lifecycle processing and consolidated searching across these information stores using ECM technologies.
Managing content volume while adhering to information management compliance is a balancing act that IT and RM professionals will continue to perform. Success lies in these two functions collaborating to understand business requirements and the possibilities and innovations that technology blended with process can achieve.
Hummingbird Ltd. is a leading global provider of enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, enabling organizations to manage the lifecycle of enterprise content from creation to disposition. Hummingbird Enterprise™ solutions enable organizations to address critical business needs, such as information management, business continuity, compliance and risk mitigation. Please visit Hummingbird
1 Case studies on these agency solutions are detailed in "Lifting the Burden," an article by Timothy J. Sprehe and Charles R. McClure in ARMA's July/August 2005 issue of the Information Management Journal.